


a figment of my worst intentions

by sunbeamsky



Category: Outer Banks (TV)
Genre: F/F, Kie's Kook Year, inspired by betty by taylor swift, kie pines over sarah for 4k words, mentions of sex but no actual sex and nothing graphic, wlw!kie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:21:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25603495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbeamsky/pseuds/sunbeamsky
Summary: What really happened during Kiara’s Kook year that made Kie establish the strict 'no Pogue-on-Pogue macking' rule.
Relationships: Kiara Carrera/Pope Heyward, Kiara Carrera/Sarah Cameron, Sarah Cameron/John B. Routledge
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	a figment of my worst intentions

**Author's Note:**

> this fandom is in desperate need of more wlw content and folklore really wants me to write obx fics inspired by every song on the album, apparently.

**_but if i showed up at your party  
would you have me? would you want me?  
would you tell me to go fuck myself  
or lead me to the garden?  
in the garden, would you trust me  
if i told you it was just a summer fling?  
i’m only seventeen, i don’t know anything  
but i know i miss you. _ **

* * *

Kie had been working up the courage to tell Sarah for months—she had been working up the courage to tell _anybody, somebody_ for years. For her whole life. 

It was never the right time and it never seemed to be the right person either. 

For a while, Kie wasn’t sure. Nobody in the world had ever talked to her about what it actually meant to be anything other than straight. ‘You just know’ didn’t really cut it either. Because she didn’t ‘just know’ what any of it meant. Sure, girls had always been beautiful, but just because she thought girls were beautiful didn’t mean she was sexually or romantically attracted to them. 

“She’s so cute,” her mom would comment as she looked over Kie’s shoulder at her Instagram feed. 

“Yeah, she is cute,” Kie would respond half-heartedly because obviously her friends were cute but her mom also shouldn’t be commenting on girls’ bodies. Kie was trying to teach her to put less of a focus on her looks, but it never seemed to work. And sure, her friend was cute, but her mom thought so too and that had to mean something. 

“She’s so hot,” Sarah said one day as they lay sprawled across the couches in Sarah’s bonus room. Megan Fox was hot, everybody thought so. It wasn’t weird to think she was hot and Sarah seemed to agree too. 

And Kie thought girls were beautiful. So many girls. 

She never really thought about what it would be like to kiss them or touch them and she never thought about having sex with them. 

Granted, she didn’t think much of sex at all. Sarah talked about it all the time, but Kie didn’t get the big deal was. 

One night, after Sarah had been going on and on about how her new boyfriend was really good at _going down_ on her, Kie decided to look it up, as she’d been too embarrassed in the moment to ask Sarah what she meant by it. One Google search lead to another and Kie was scrolling through a porn site. The thought of it alone was enough to make Kie want to hide under her covers forever and never face another living soul. It felt dirty and wrong and every instinct told her that this was exploiting women and she needed to close the tab. But she scrolled because the article she’d read had been weird and she had never heard of some of the words and body parts that supposedly she had. So she scrolled a little farther. 

And dicks were gross. Like abominably gross. They looked wrinkly and slimy and the thought of letting one touch her, letting one come near her mouth, made her feel stiff and scared and small. How did anybody want to touch those? Maybe with the right guy it would be different…

But nothing about the women grossed her out. The images were hot and Kie knew she was supposed to react that way to them. Thinking the women weren’t gross didn’t mean she thought they were hot either. It just wasn’t grossed because she had looked at herself a million times naked or in the mirror when she got out of the shower. There was nothing shocking or revolutionary about seeing naked women. It was a little hot, though. 

Finally, she clicked on a video and instantly wanted to scream when the intro music blared through her bedroom. She turned the volume all the way down and paused the video for a moment just in case one of her parents came knocking at her door. Nobody came. She hit play. 

She scrolled through the video, not quite ready to actually watch it yet, until it came to the part she had searched for. The guy doing that was much less scary and much sexier. She understood the appeal of that. Maybe having sex wasn’t as scary and gross as it had always seemed. Until he stopped doing that and started pounding into the girl. Nothing about it turned her on whatsoever. But the video barely showed anything but an entirely too zoomed in image of the grossest action 

Kie had ever seen in her life. She closed the video and decided that was enough for the night. 

The next time Sarah talked to Kie about sex it made both more and less sense. Sarah seemed to think that all of it was hot, not just the part where the guy went down on her. She told Kie that she had never done the other part—the real part—but that she had always been excited about it. Kie didn’t know how to say she had never felt excited about _that_ , but quickly the conversation moved back to their history homework and that was that. 

Kie had so many more questions but she wasn’t ready to ask. 

Freshman health class was an absolute joke. The district had a strict abstinence-only policy and her health teacher gave them a quick sex run down where she mentioned the word condom only once but STD and unwanted pregnancy like ten times each. Kie was more confused when she left than when she had gone into class that day. Sarah hadn’t been paying any attention to the presentation and then proceeded to heavily make fun of it during lunch. Kie laughed along with her jokes, even though some of them she didn’t quite understand. 

In typical North Carolina fashion, there was no LGBT sex education—let alone straight sex education. 

Not that Kie was inherently curious about what it meant to have sex with girls. But it should at least be offered. There had to be some secret lesbian or bisexual girls in her grade who were just dying to know what they were supposed to do. 

Kie didn’t understand a lot of sexual attraction, wondered sometimes if she was just young or immature or weird. She wondered for quite some time if maybe she was asexual. Occasionally though, she got a really strong urge to touch herself and it made her question it even more. She didn’t understand what any of the sexualities actually meant and what they entailed. 

The only thing that made sense was that she was nowhere near ready to have sex with anybody yet. 

Her first kiss came too soon, sooner than she wanted or was ready for. It was weird and fast and when his lips left hers the space between her lips and her nose felt slimy and sticky. She touched her lips for a moment, thinking there had to be a trail of spit leftover from his own but when she pulled her fingers away there was nothing. He was grinning across the circle of people but Kie felt trapped under all their stares and shoved the empty beer bottle in Sarah’s direction. 

Sarah was absolutely giddy and Kie wished she had never told her friend that she’d never actually kissed anybody before. 

The guy was in her Biology class and he had always been such an asshole. She never in a million years would’ve kissed him if it wasn’t for Sarah. 

“It’ll be fun, I promise. And even if the kiss is bad you get it over with and then when you actually meet somebody you want to kiss you’ll know what to do.”

It had made sense when Sarah explained it that way and begrudgingly Kie sat crisscross applesauce beside Sarah on the shag carpet floor. Luckily, the bottle didn’t ever land on Kie a second time. Sarah had fun and when the game was over she had found herself a new beau. Kie decided it would be best not to remind Sarah that she was still technically in a relationship. 

Sarah wanted to stay past curfew so she could talk to the guy so Kiara had to call home and convince her parents that she was already over at Sarah’s house. Sarah did a good impression of Rose from the quiet solitude of the bathroom and Kie’s mom seemed to buy it. They stayed way too late, late enough that there were only a few people left and things were getting awkward. Rafe had to come pick them up since neither Sarah nor Kie could drive yet. That was even more awkward. 

Kie filled them each a glass of water from the kitchen and managed to make it upstairs to Sarah’s room with about two-thirds of the water still in the cups. Sarah had two sips and then spilled the rest on the hardwood floor. Kie drank her entire glass and then pulled off her jeans and tossed them in a ball on the floor. Sarah was still in her party dress but had crawled into her bedsheets as if she didn’t care. Kiara took of Sarah’s wedges and threw them down by her jeans. 

She borrowed a pair of Sarah’s pajama shorts and then crawled into the bed beside Sarah. 

“What did you think of Topper?” Sarah asked in a slurred mumble of letters that Kie needed a moment to piece together. 

“He was okay,” she said quietly, tying her hair into a bun on the top of her head, wishing she had her bonnet and also her retainer at home. She was still drunk enough that neither mattered all that much in the moment. 

“I think I could fall in love with him, really Kie,” Sarah hummed. Kie didn’t know how to respond to that because Sarah was dating Chris and Topper was kind of a dick. Not kind of, he was a total dick. 

“Was the kiss really that good?” Kie asked because it was the nicest thing she could think to say. Sarah turned, shoving her hands under the side of her face and looking across the bed at Kie. 

“It was the best kiss of my life. I mean, the things he can do with his tongue,” she squealed. Kie shushed her gently so Sarah wouldn’t wake her dad and Rose in the next room. Sarah just laughed as a flush rolled across her cheeks and she bit down her bottom lip. She was looking past Kie as if she could see Topper standing in the doorway behind her. “He’s so hot.”

“I guess.”

“Come on, Kie. Don’t act like you can’t see it.”

Kie really didn’t see it. Sure, Topper was the only boy in their grade who had abs—which he never shut up about—but Kie didn’t get the big appeal with abs. There were other and better features that were way hotter than abs. Eyes, for a start, held so much emotion and were beautiful. Hair was hot too, when it was styled right. Arms and hands were even hot sometimes. But abs just looked like Legos and Kie had never cared much about them. 

“He’s okay.”

“Name somebody hotter,” Sarah challenged, smirking like she had stumped Kie. 

“I don’t know,” Kie mulled, nobody in their class was all that hot.

“Seriously, you have to like _somebody_ ,” Sarah whined, and then in a much softer tone, “you never talk to me about boys. Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I trust you. You’re my best friend.”

“Then tell me what boys you think are cute.”

Sarah was really close and her cheeks were flushed and she was grinning and—oh. Oh, fuck. 

Kie wondered for the first time in her entire life what would happen if she just leaned in and pressed her lips against somebody else. She only let herself wonder for a moment. It was stupid. It didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t sexually attracted to Sarah, she just wanted to know what it would be like to kiss her. Not kiss, just touch Sarah’s lips with her own. To just lean in and see what happens. 

“The guys in our class are so stupid and half of them don’t even wash their hands when they go to the bathroom.”

“Kie,” Sarah whined, giggling in her drunken state, “They don’t really have to wash their hands anyway. It’s not like they have to wipe.”

“They have to hold it in their hands, Sarah.”

“But like, not the pee part.”

“Ew,” Kie squirmed, laughing herself as Sarah erupted into a fit of giggles. 

“They wash their hands when they shit.”

“Not all of them,” Kie argued, knowing for a fact that she had seen one of the boys come out of the bathroom with a mysterious brown tint on his fingertips. “Trust me.”

“Whatever, Kie. I know you like somebody and I’m gonna find out who it is. Just you wait,” she trailed off as a yawn overtook her. Her eye lids fluttered and suddenly she was scooting closer to Kie and rested her head in the space between Kie’s collar bones and her head. Sarah was warm against her exposed skin and pieces of his hair tickled the bottom of Kie’s chin. 

Something in Kie’s stomach tingled. Something lower than her stomach tingled. 

It didn’t mean anything. Kie was just lonely and the touch surprised her. It was nothing. 

Kie thought maybe she should reach out and wrap an arm around Sarah or something. Sarah seemed content and Kie thought it might also make the entire thing feel too intimate and weird. She didn’t want to give Sarah the wrong idea. Sarah pressed a kiss to her cheek and then rolled back over to her side of the bed. 

“What about Zach?” Sarah asked as she tugged the sheets back up around her. 

“He’s gross,” Kie answered because Zach truly was gross and often wolf-whistled at girls in the hallway. 

“Damon?”

“He farts all the time.”

“Okay, what about Eddie? Eddie is like the nicest guy ever, tell me you don’t think he’s cute.”

“I don’t think he’s cute.”

“God, Kie!” Sarah exclaimed, pulling the pillow from underneath her head and slamming it against Kie. Kie laughed because it was easier than continuing the conversation. “I’m gonna figure it out.”

“Go ahead.”

Kie tried her best not to think about the few seconds when she pictured leaning in. She would erase it from her memory or wash it down through her system with the alcohol and pee out its memory in the morning. It was a one-time thing and there was nothing to dwell on or over think about it. And, she hadn’t actually kissed Sarah or really even thought about kissing. She just wondered if Sarah would lean in at all or if she would pull away. A science experiment, really. 

Until it wasn’t a one-time thing. 

Until she thought about what it would actually feel like to kiss Sarah. 

Until she thought about the parts of her body that tingled when Sarah curled up beside her.

Until Sarah would run up to her in school and sling an arm around her shoulder or hold her hand as they walked down the hall to class or played with her hair when she was bored in class and didn’t want to listen to the lecture. 

And Kie started to realize that it absolutely was not nothing. 

And that it wasn’t just Sarah. Sure, it was mostly Sarah. But it wasn’t just Sarah. 

It was girls. It was girls at school and at the grocery store and at the Wreck and online and everywhere she went there was so many beautiful girls. And it wasn’t nothing at all. 

Kie decided it was okay for her to admit out loud—out loud in her mind not with her words—that she liked girls. That she didn’t like boys at all, not even a little bit, but that she liked girls. She watched lesbian porn and didn’t looked away or skip through. She let herself think about girls in bed at night or in the shower. She never let herself think of Sarah because she couldn’t make it weird. 

She really didn’t want to make it weird.

Which was hard because Sarah was a very touchy person and a very flirty person. With everybody, not just guys or her latest boyfriend. Sarah was always touching her or telling her how cute she looked and sometimes when Kie did something stupid Sarah would laugh and then cup Kie’s cheek and tell her how sweet she was. It felt like flirting and Kie had to repeat like a mantra over and over and over again that Sarah didn’t know what she was doing. 

Kie was desperate to say this new—not so new—revelation out loud. Telling it to her parents felt way to formal. Telling it to anybody but Sarah felt like a betrayal. 

But saying it out loud meant she could never take it back. 

And what if she wasn’t actually a lesbian? What if she just didn’t understand what she was feeling and she had confused finding girls beautiful with being a lesbian? What if she finally kissed a girl and it felt awful? What if she went through the trouble of telling the entire world she was a lesbian to find out she was straight all along. She could be straight…

But Sarah wouldn’t judge her, probably not. It was probably going to make things weird between them, Sarah probably wouldn’t be so handsy with her anymore. But then she would stop pestering Kie about finding a boyfriend and they could talk about girls and guys together. 

Everything was going to be okay, all she needed to do was find the right time and she would tell Sarah. 

The right time, Kie decided, was going to be after Sarah’s birthday that way if things did get weird it wouldn’t ruin Sarah’s special day. 

But then everything did go weird and suddenly Sarah was posting a snapchat story of a birthday party that Kie definitely hadn’t been invited to and the entire world came crumbling down. 

The first thing Kie did was make a mental list in her head of every time she had ever been drunk. She could remember all of it—had never been drunk enough to actually forget things or blackout—and she had never come on to Sarah or mentioned her feelings for girls. No conversations, so brush of her lips on Sarah’s forehead. She didn’t think it was obvious. Sarah had never acted like Kie freaked her out at all. 

Sarah and Kie were best friends. 

But Sarah’s snapchat story had birthday balloons and they were drinking champagne and Sarah drank a shot from Topper’s belly button and Kie had never been invited. 

Sarah hadn’t fucking invited her. 

As the walls shattered and the floorboards beneath her feet sunk into the sand, Kie let her fury consume her and she dialed three little numbers before she could even think twice. She knew Sarah’s address by heart and the call was quick. 

Kie never understood what went wrong. She never did anything, she retraced her steps and mulled over every word. Sarah hadn’t even acted weird, didn’t distance herself from Kie leading up to the party of anything. 

“You bitch,” Sarah had cried the next day in school when she marched right up to Kie. “You called the fucking cops on me?!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kie said with a stone-cold façade, shoving past Sarah because the thought of Sarah actually being mad at Kie right now was enough to make her blood boil. 

How dare Sarah not invite Kie to her birthday party. How dare Sarah feel entitled to anger. 

They didn’t say another word to each other and Sarah avoided Kie like the plague. Kie was angry, even more angry than she was sad for a while. And then she was all sad and completely lonely and found herself hanging out with Pope, JJ, and John B because there was nobody else and she couldn’t handle having feelings for another one of her friends ever again. 

“If I’m going to be part of the Pogues,” she announced one night after JJ had suggest they formally invite Kiara into their stupid ‘HMS Pogue’ club that apparently revolved around fishing and surfing, “then we have to make something clear.”

“What’s that?” Pope asked, taking a sip of his beer and flicking JJ’s hand away when JJ tried to tilt the can so it spilled all over Pope’s face. 

“Absolutely no Pogue-on-Pogue macking.”

JJ pretended to fall over so his back crashed into Pope and he threw a hand dramatically over his forehead as if he was in true distress. 

“Break my heart, Kiara, why don’t you.”

“Shut up, JJ. I think we can do that,” Pope agreed, even though she ended up putting JJ in a head lock. He smiled at Kie though and she knew he would at least be respectful of it. 

“That’s fine by me,” John B agreed too. 

“Dealio,” JJ whined as he tugged at Pope’s grip until the other let him free. 

“I’m serious.”

“We hear ya.”

Everything was good for a long time. The guys flirted with her here and there but never anything serious and nobody ever bothered her. And then John B kissed her and that was weird. Kie had never thought of him that way. She loved the guy, he was one of her best friends, but he was far from her type and luckily, he seemed content with just being friends. 

And then she started dating Sarah and the first thing Sarah said to Kie was that she was a ‘shit talking bitch’ and Kie wanted to bury John B in the sand and let high tide have its way with him because how dare he defend Sarah fucking Cameron right in front of her?

And how fucking dare the Pogues trap her on a boat with Sarah fucking Cameron?

“I mean, really,” Kie asked softly, hesitantly, when the weed had subsided her anger and the darkness concealed her fears. It seemed like the only time and space in the universe where it was safe to ask about that night. “What did I do?”

Sarah was quiet for a moment, eyes red and wide but Kie could tell she was still sober enough to think properly. Sarah sighed and looked away for a moment. 

“You liked me.”

Shit. Fuck. Maybe she had let it slip or maybe she had been a lot more obvious than she thought or—

Sarah kept talking and Kie realized Sarah didn’t mean ‘like’ as in romantically but ‘like’ as in platonically. It was confusing as hell but it was a lot easier of a conversation so Kie went with it. 

She was still mad but she admitted to Sarah that she had called the cops when they were laying side by side in bed that night. Sarah laughed and called her a bitch, but in the flirty and carefree way Sarah had when they had once been friends. Kie decided that maybe they could be friends, but she had to stop thinking of Sarah when she was in bed at night or in the shower. She could never in a million years lean in or even think about leaning in. 

So when Pope got high for the first time and told Kie he was in love with her, she went with it. Not at first. It wasn’t what she wanted and she wasn’t going to pretend to love somebody she didn’t. Especially when that somebody was Pope—the kindest, most thoughtful, wonderful boy in the world who actually washed his hands when he went to the bathroom and held in his farts like a gentleman. Pope was the absolute last person in the world she would ever want to hurt.

But he was also safe. She loved Pope, so maybe one day she could learn how to be in love with Pope. When he kissed her there weren’t sparks but it wasn’t gross and it didn’t make her feel small and stupid. 

She knew it was a mistake. She knew it was selfish. But she did it anyway. She clung to Pope when she heard the news that Sarah and John B had drowned. He held her tight and cried against her neck and kissed her forehead. She held on to his shoulders and shut her eyes and wished it was Sarah who was holding her instead.


End file.
